Profile: Yoky Matsuoka

Posted 07.16.08

NOVA scienceNOW

Growing up in Japan, Yoky Matsuoka was on her way to becoming a world-class tennis player. When injuries ended her tennis dreams, she turned to another early interest: robotics. Twenty years later Matsuoka is now a leader in the emerging field of neurobotics, hard at work creating robot technology that can help disabled persons.

Transcript

PROFILE: YOKY MATSUOKA

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Here at NOVA
scienceNOW, we've always considered it the epitome of cool to be smart
and into science, but sometimes kids think they have to choose between being
smart and being popular.

Well,
in this episode's profile, you'll meet a popular kid who finally
decided to embrace her inner geek, and now she's reaping the rewards.

At
age 37, Yoky Matsuoka is finally not afraid to stand out.

At
the University of Washington, Yoky is a pioneer in neurobotics, an emerging
field that combines neuroscience with building robots. Yoky won the MacArthur
"genius" award for this visionary work.

YOKY
MATSUOKA: It's easy to describe Star
Wars and say, "Remember the scene where Luke goes...and then moves the
hand around, and it looks like a real hand, but there's a little door
that opens on the arm, and there are all mechanical pieces moving around?"
And that's what I make.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Thanks to her,
people who need them will someday have prosthetic hands that will look and move
like real human hands. And what makes Yoky's hand so remarkable is that
it will be controlled directly by the human brain.

RODNEY
BROOKS (Massachusetts Institute of Technology):
I don't think Yoky's ever just
one of the crowd. She's doing stuff that's very different from what
other people are doing, and I think she enjoys being out there on the edge.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Growing up in
Tokyo, Japan, Yoky always knew somewhere, deep down, she was not like other
kids.

YOKY
MATSUOKA: I knew that I wasn't the
same as everybody else. Somehow, something was different.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Then she found the
most unlikely of soul mates.

YOKY
MATSUOKA: When I first saw John McEnroe? I
bet I was about five or eight. He had a personality that was different from
other people. He really stood out. I think that's why he was called the
"bad boy" of tennis.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: At age 11, Yoky
started playing tennis, too. But as a girl in Japan, she knew she could never
be like John McEnroe.

YOKY
MATSUOKA: Oh yeah, it's not
acceptable to be bold; it's not acceptable to really express your
opinions, especially as a girl. I think I was afraid to show that I was
different, and I admired people who could show that they are different and not
be afraid of it.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Tennis became
Yoky's obsession and her identity. And she was good.

When
Yoky was 16, her parents, both former athletes, sent Yoky to the United States,
with the hope of her becoming a professional tennis player.

YOKY
MATSUOKA: I was really pushing and playing
a lot of tennis—maybe three and a half hours of tennis and one hour
conditioning every day.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: And at her new high
school, in Palm Bay, Florida, she tried hard to fit in. She studied the show Friends for hours on end, to learn English and how to act like the perfect American
girl. She even changed the spelling of her name.

YOKY
MATSUOKA: My real name was Yoko. And I
often got expressions saying, "Oh you're Yoko, just like Yoko
Ono." And I changed my last letter from o to y, to "Yoky."

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Yoky was fitting
in, but when she began to do well in math and science, she started to stand out
in a way she didn't like.

YOKY
MATSUOKA: Whenever I received an award,
whether it's a science award or a math award, my friends would come over
and say, "You got an award, so you are smart?" And then I would
say, "No, no. That's just a mistake. I don't know anything
about it. I don't know what they're thinking, but since
they're going to give me an award, I'll just take it."

It
sounded like a geek or a nerd. And I just didn't want to be that. As
girls, we all wanted to be accepted as pretty girls or athletic girls, not the
science girls or math girls. If people perceived me as an airhead, then that
gained my popularity; I get to have cool friends.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Yoky was so afraid
of looking like a nerd that she wouldn't be seen carrying a book.

YOKY
MATSUOKA: I even got to the point where I
pretended that I was never studying and then just hid in the library for two
days before the test, and then I studied. I had to live a double life. I never
tried to just stop learning math and science. I just secretly did it.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: On the tennis
court, Yoky was on the fast track to becoming a pro. She even reached the
qualifying rounds for Wimbledon. But Yoky's body could not withstand the
stress.

YOKY
MATSUOKA: The first tennis injury, I
sprained my ankle so bad that, basically, the bone came off with it. Since
then, almost every year I had a pretty severe injury.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: She secretly dreamt
of creating a robotic tennis partner to help her strengthen her body and keep
training through her injuries.

YOKY
MATSUOKA: And I thought, well you know,
"I know some science and I know some robotics. Wouldn't that be
great, if I can build a robot that, you know, has multiple knobs, and said,
âOh today, this person should have this kind of spin on the serve?'
Or somebody else, who just would just not miss any balls but would not hit
really hard, you know, push me just the right amount every day."

So
that's really the first time I started thinking a robotic tennis player
would be great.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Due to injuries,
Yoky never played professional tennis. But she did get to build robots. At
M.I.T., she studied under the world-famous roboticist, Rodney Brooks.

RODNEY
BROOKS: So, in principle, I see no reason
that we can't build a robot, eventually, that is as capable as a human
being.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Like John McEnroe,
Rodney was known as the bad boy in his world.

YOKY
MATSUOKA: Rod is called "bad
boy" of robotics because he also has an attitude. He thinks wild ideas
that other people won't think of and won't accept.

RODNEY
BROOKS: I went around reveling in being
different and reveling in telling everyone else they were wrong.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Rodney was working
on Cog, a cutting edge humanoid robot.

YOKY
MATSUOKA: Different body parts were up for
grab.

"Which
body part would you like to work on?" And I said, "Well, you know,
I'm a tennis player. I'd really like to understand more about arms
and hands. So I think I'm going to work on hands."

RODNEY
BROOKS: So this is the hand that Yoky
built for her master's thesis. It fit along the end of an arm for Cog.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: It was the first
robotic hand that Yoky ever built.

RODNEY
BROOKS: Yoky used to always surprise me,
because she would go into a field where she knew nothing, really, and within
three or four weeks, she'd be knowing everything about it and making
contributions there.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: She thrived in this
new field, but Yoky was still hiding. She wouldn't even buy books because
she was afraid of seeming smart.

YOKY
MATSUOKA: Second year of graduate school
at M.I.T., I had to put a nametag and it says "Hello my name is,"
and I was supposed to put "Yoky" on it. But I thought it would be
really cool if I put "Airhead." I looked around at
everybody's faces, and I didn't see all positive like, "Yeah,
girl. Go girl!"

My
advisor, Rod Brooks, came and, basically, pulled me on the side and said,
"Look, Yoky. This is not going well. Stop acting like an airhead.
It's not going to take you far, as long as you're acting this
way." And that's the day that it really hit me hard and I thought,
"Wow. Now I understand. Okay, I'm going to stop doing this. Acting
airhead is not the right dual life that I should be living in anymore."
That was one of the few turning points in my life.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Now, 10 years
later, Yoky has her own lab at the University of Washington and is working on a
new robotic hand. Except this time, it's a robotic hand for humans.

YOKY
MATSUOKA: The hand is really amazing.
Hands set us apart from other species. You know we built this society because
we can use tools. So that means that people who are disabled and can't
use their hands, they're not given back this full human capability. I
really want to give that function back to those people.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Yoky is building a
prosthetic hand that will look and move exactly like a real human hand.

BRIAN
DELLON (University of Washington):
The index finger, for example, has seven
muscles. That means we need seven motors to control and make it work exactly
like a human finger would. When the motor moves, it pulls these strings, just
like a puppet, and the finger will then move in the correct way.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: They use infrared
cameras to track exactly how the muscles in the hand move.

YOKY
MATSUOKA: As I move my finger and record
the motion itself, I can play that back using my robotic finger.

So if I curl my knuckle joint, then I can make the
robot to curl the knuckle joint the same way.

BRIAN
DELLON: As you
tense and release your muscles, they actually generate electrical activity, and
so we're trying to tease out the some of different ways the brain
controls our fingers and our muscles, as we're trying to do a certain
task.

YOKY
MATSUOKA: One day, people are going to be
walking around with a prosthetic hand, which...nobody can tell it's
prosthetic. It moves like it, it looks like it, it's controlled naturally
from the brain. That's how it's going to be.

I
really wanted to be somebody who sticks out, be different, have an attitude. If
people say, "Hey, you have an attitude," I think, to me,
that's a compliment.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: And with her
mathematician husband, Simon, Yoky lives this attitude both inside and outside
her lab.

YOKY
MATSUOKA: I am the first generation who is
openly having this dual life and saying, "You know what? I'm not
going to wait 'til tenure. I'm going to start having my
kids." And it's really exciting, but it's really, really
hard.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Using her MacArthur
"genius" award money, Yoky's on a mission to pave the way for
the next generation of women in science.

YOKY
MATSUOKA: What I really would like to do
is to change the image of math and science. And if I could really change that
image, then it's okay to be smart. And it's okay to be a girl and
then still be able to pursue math and science, and it's accepted.

I'd
like to be role model, and I want them to see that that's what I'm
doing, and to achieve that and then do better than me.

This material is based upon work
supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0638931. Any
opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this
material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of
the National Science Foundation.

Funding for NOVA scienceNOW is provided by the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and PBS viewers.

National corporate funding for NOVA is provided by Cancer Treatment Centers of America.
Major funding for NOVA is provided by the David H. Koch Fund for Science, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and PBS viewers.